The Debt

by Natalie Edwards

  “I didn’t say that,” said El, automatically on the defensive.

  “You didn’t have to. And anyway, like I said - it’s none of my business. I’ve got my own shit to deal with.”

  A curtain of silence fell between them, heavy and awkward.

  “Ruby ever mention my old man?” Karen said eventually, the question sounding casual but evidently - to El’s mind - anything but. “Leon Baxter?”

  “No,” El lied. “Never.”

  Vanished like a puff of smoke, Ruby had said. Word was he’d stitched up his crew on his last job and done a runner with the takings.

  “Bullshit,” Karen said. “Of course she has. Woman like you wouldn’t get into something like this with a bunch of strangers without doing your homework on ‘em. And it’s not as if it’s a secret, is it, what happened to him? I still get people asking where he went, when they find out who I am. As if I’ll turn round and tell ‘em.”

  “But you think it was something to do with Marchant?”

  Karen stared down at the front of the coat; took longer than she needed to tie the belt around her waist. Buying herself time, El thought. Pulling herself together, even if she doesn’t want to show it.

  “I know it was,” she said, not looking at El. “I didn’t know him, Leon - not personally. I was about 18 months when he upped and went. Even when I think I can remember something about him, him throwing me up in the air to make me laugh or taking me to look at the giraffes at the zoo, I don’t actually remember it. I’ve just seen it in a photo somewhere or had someone tell me it happened. You know what I mean?”

  El’s own recollections of her mother were, she thought, fairly reliable - or as reliable as any memory ever could be, reconstructed through the distorting prisms of time and distance, grief and nostalgia. But even she was prey to the occasional cognitive misstep, to a flashback felt so vividly she’d imagine, momentarily, that the associated event must have been true, must have happened, even when she knew, logically, that it couldn’t be, couldn’t have: the two of them standing in an airport security line, when they’d never been abroad; sitting down together to eat a roast lamb dinner, when her mother hadn’t touched red meat since the 60s; rooting through the attic for Christmas decorations, when they’d lived in a maisonette.

  “Yeah,” she said, “I think I do.”

  “But other people knew him,” Karen said. “My uncles, my granny, my mum. People I trust. And I trust what they tell me about him - when they tell me that he weren’t the sort of bloke to just do one in the night. Especially not with a baby on the way.”

  “A baby?”

  “My little brother. Mum was five months pregnant with him when the old man vanished.”

  Karen adjusted the collar of the coat; pulled it up to her ears and over her neck, covering the highest and most visible of the corset’s straps.

  “That’s how I know,” she continued. “That it was Marchant - that Marchant did him in. See, Leon was excited about the baby. He was well into kids, especially his kids, everyone said so. It was all he talked about, them last few months. And mum getting pregnant again, with me and my sister so little, it made him…. I suppose you’d say re-evaluate some of his choices. That’s how my Uncle Perce put it - re-evaluate his choices. Not about the job, exactly - a man like that doesn’t just stop robbing, not when he’s so good at it it’s practically an artform. But about some of the people he’d fallen in with. Some of the people he’d been taking orders from.”

  “Marchant?”

  “Marchant, right. He’d been doing bits and bobs for him for a few years. Nothing heavy - getting round security systems, lifting documents, that sort of thing. Manila folder, industrial espionage bollocks. Then one day the ask changes. Marchant starts telling him to get physical, here and there - rough up a guard, kick a German Shepherd in the head so it won’t bark. And Leon doesn’t like it. He was a big bloke, a hard bloke, could’ve been a bouncer from the look of him, and he used to go boxing as a kid, so he was built, you know what I mean? But he never used his fists on a job, never wanted to. It wasn’t his style.”

  “So after he’s said no to Marchant a couple of times - said he’s not up for hurting animals, let alone people - he decides, enough’s enough. Or so Perce says. He goes home and talks to my Mum about how to handle it: Marchant had a lot of clout even back then, everyone knew it, and he wasn’t someone you said no to if you wanted an easy life. And him and Mum, they decide between them that they’ll go away for a while, get out of London. Not forever; just for a little bit, until Marchant loses interest in him and things go back to normal.”

  “But they both know he can’t go, just like that. He’s got to be clever about it. So between them they say: he’ll do one last job for Marchant, to get him off his back, create a bit of breathing space. And then they’ll go, before Marchant comes back asking for another favour.”

  “And was there a job on the table?” El said.

  “Not right then, not ’til about a week later. But here’s the thing - the job came, but no-one knew what it was. Not Mum, not Perce, not any of them. Leon just gets a call one day from Marchant’s head of security, this bastard Lomax, telling him to get up north, pronto. Gives him a time and an address, but fuck all else. No details, nothing.”

  “Up north?” El thought - her mind’s eye picturing Lomax, younger and healthy, driving through Leicester city centre in the middle of the night all those years ago, looking out for somewhere he could dump a body. What did “up north” mean to a Londoner? Were the Midlands “up north”? Was Leicester?

  “Where?” she asked, not sure she wanted to know the answer. “What was the address?”

  “The exact address?” Karen said. “Fucked if I know. A place called Holt, that was all mum got out of him. You heard of it? It’s up by Cheshire – little town near the Welsh border. Might even be in Wales, for all I know.”

  Not the Midlands, then, El thought. Thank Christ for that.

  “And he went?” she asked.

  “Oh, he went. Takes three of his regular lads with him in the back of the van, and off they go. Lomax asked him to go alone, but that was never Leon’s style either - he always liked to have backup with him. It was one of them who set the talk going later on, by the way - them rumours about him taking their cut and doing a runner. Ungrateful bastard - he knew what actually went down up there, knew what must have happened to Leon, and he still talked shit about him.”

  “See, Perce and one of his brothers, my Uncle Keith - they went and had a word with those lads after, once they’d got back and it looked like Leon had done a disappearing act. And Perce and Keith - they’re big blokes too. Not people you want to fuck around with when they’re asking questions. So those lads who’d been up north with Leon, it didn’t take ‘em long to start talking. And what they said…”

  Karen paused; took a breath.

  “What they said,” she finished, “was that the job was a doddle - a piece of piss. Just a smash and grab in some factory in the middle of nowhere - not skilled work, nothing that needed finessing. They couldn’t understand why Marchant needed to send someone all the way up there to do it, when a local boy could have done it just as well. They got in, got the stuff - machine parts, one of them told Perce - and then they were off, back up the motorway. Only, they said, that was when it started to go pear-shaped.”

  “They’d arranged with Lomax to stop off at one of the services on the M6, Knutsford way, to do the handover - the goods, whatever they were, for the cash. 8 grand - not bad going for the ‘70s, even split 4 ways. So they pull into the car park, Leon steps outside to make the trade, walks into the cafe with a sports bag full of cogs and spindles over his shoulder… and that’s it. He doesn’t come back. Leaves them there in the back of the van with the engine running.”

  “None of them saw anything?”

  “They said they didn’t. And like I said, Perce and Keith, they’re hard bastards. But then, so was Lomax. So’s Marchant. So who really knows?
But doesn’t take a genius to work out what happened, does it? It’s pretty fucking obvious.”

  “Is it?”

  “Yeah, it is. Leon was valuable - the best cracksman south of the river. Marchant wouldn’t have wanted to let him go - definitely wouldn’t have wanted him to go running to a competitor. And I’m thinking he heard on the grapevine that Leon was looking for a way out. That’s why he had Lomax lure him up there, had him make up some bullshit reason for getting Leon out of London. So he could kill him.”

  ———

  Rose rewound the camera footage, pausing on an unflattering close-up of Henderson - sweating, wild-eyed and straining at the manacles, a light dusting of cocaine still clinging to his philtrum.

  “If I had to bet on an image most likely to grace the front page of the News of the World this weekend,” Rose said, “it would be this one.”

  “You’ve sent them the video already?” El asked. If she had, she really did move fast - their first round of viewing had been a live feed, sent as it happened to Rose’s home computer, and thereafter to the screen in front of them, from Karen’s technologically-augmented lingerie.

  Henderson, almost certainly, was still tied to the bed - beginning to wonder, perhaps, if there were release catches built somewhere into his restraints. Karen, meanwhile, would barely have had time to catch the night bus home.

  “Not yet,” Rose said. “But Hannah should be passing it along to a friend on the news desk first thing tomorrow. And don’t worry,” she added. “He won’t be on his own like that for long. Karen left the front door of the flat unlocked, and I asked to put in a quick call to his wife as she was leaving - there’s a phone box just around the corner. I’d be very surprised if Mrs Henderson wasn’t in a taxi on her way there now. Although letting him out may not be the first item on her agenda.”

  At least this way she’ll find out first-hand, El thought. And not from the Sunday papers.

  “I feel a little bad for the guy,” she said, picturing the scene unfolding - Mrs Henderson pacing the room, alternately shouting and crying and demanding answers, while Seymour - bound at the wrists, caged at the crotch, heart pounding a mile a minute from the coke still in his system - cast around for an explanation, any explanation, that would rationalise his predicament.

  “He claimed £10,000 in expenses last year,” Rose said, “and spent nearly all of it on sex workers. Feel sorry for Mrs Henderson, if you must - but really, he has no-one to blame but himself.”

  She looked up at the screen and smiled, her face softening.

  “Seb would have found this hysterical,” she added.

  “He didn’t like politicians?” El asked, curious. It was one of the few times she’d heard Rose reference her husband directly since they’d started the job; had assumed that, even three years on from his death, she found talking about him distressing, the loss of him an unhealed wound likely to be aggravated by any mention of him at all.

  “He didn’t like hypocrites,” Rose said.

  “And he thought Henderson was a hypocrite?”

  “He thought men like Henderson were hypocrites - Tories especially. Politicians and editors and talking heads who’d sing the virtues of Back To Basics and Victorian Values and then sneak away to pick up strangers on the Heath or pay a teenage rent boy to shove a ball-gag in their mouths. He was at the Tory party conference in ’87, up in Blackpool - I forget why now. Something for work, I expect. He heard Thatcher’s speech, the one on education and morality and children being taught that they have an inalienable right to be gay. Came back absolutely seething.”

  This piece of information about Sebastian Winchester – Sir Sebastian Winchester – sat uncomfortably alongside the impression El realised she’d already formed of him: of an overgrown public schoolboy, commercially-minded and business-literate but solidly traditional at the core. A natural Thatcher voter; a champion of property rights and unfettered markets, albeit one with only a limited grasp of the ideological nuances of Thatcherism.

  “He had a lot of gay friends?” she asked. It seemed the most obvious solution to the misfit; men like Winchester, in her experience - or, at least, Winchester as she’d imagined him - tended not to develop liberal inclinations later in life without a precipitating incident or personal catalyst.

  Rose squinted at her; creased her forehead, confused.

  “Well… yes,” she said slowly. “He did, certainly. We both did. But, I mean… that wasn’t why it upset him. Seb was gay. Didn’t Ruby tell you?”

  Chapter 17

  Oxford

  1975

  The Old Moat looked innocuous from the outside - just another steep-pitched Tudor Revival pub tucked away down a side street, a half-hour walk from St Hilda’s and light years away from the usual student haunts. Nothing out of the ordinary.

  If you didn’t know what it was - who it catered for - then you’d have walked right past it. Maybe even popped inside for a pint after work before you realised.

  It wasn’t obvious.

  Rose didn’t go in - not at first. Just stood outside, on the other side of the narrow road, watching from the doorway of a boarded-up tobacconist as a steady trickle of men and women - though mostly men - went in and out. And they weren’t obvious either, she thought - at least, most of them weren’t. Perhaps some of the men wore shirts a little more fitted than you’d see on the high street, blue jeans just that bit tighter around the buttocks than the average, and some of the women had short hair and ties around their necks - but so did some of the girls at college, even the ones with boyfriends. The clothes on the own didn’t mean anything, necessarily.

  After 20 minutes in the doorway, when it was full dark and beginning to rain, she crossed the road and walked inside.

  The pub was loud and heaving, every spare inch of space crammed with music and voices, limbs and bodies - bodies standing, talking, dancing, expressing waves of heat and a steady haze of cigarette smoke. By the door, two men were kissing, the back of one pressed up against the wall by the chest of the other - ordinary-looking men, middle-aged and paunchy, still wearing the suits they must have put on to go to the office that morning. She stared at them, then became aware of what she was doing and looked immediately away, blushing, in the opposite direction. Neither man seemed to notice - or if they noticed, to care.

  She squeezed herself through the bodies, parting stiff denim and sweat-soaked nylon until she was close to the bar. The queue was three deep, the beer pumps barely visible through the sea of heads blocking her way. She stared down at the ground as she waited her turn to be served, at the sticky burgundy carpet under her boots - determinedly not looking up, not looking around.

  Something - someone - tapped her on the shoulder.

  She spun around.

  A shaggy-haired blond boy stood behind her, smiling good-naturedly.

  “We’ve met before, haven’t we?” he said, loudly enough that she could hear him over the competing background noises. He sounded, to her, like every other boy at Oxford: polite, upper-crust, undeniably southern. Soft.

  She studied his face, trying to place it but failing.

  “Last month,” he said helpfully. “At Lance Keaton’s party. I was Bowie, you were Liza in Cabaret.”

  The party, at least, she remembered: a fancy dress thing in a house off-campus, hosted by a braying third year boy done up - appropriately, she’d felt at the time - as a pantomime horse. She’d gone, reluctantly, at the insistence of a girl from her corridor, an anxious social secretary type who couldn’t bear the thought of Rose - or anyone - opting out of an invitation, and who’d pressed upon Rose not only the importance of making an effort with her costume, but a cane-and-black hat combination that had made Sally Bowles the most straightforward look to achieve at short notice.

  Unfortunately, there had been at least three David Bowies at the party, that she’d counted - all of them sporting the same orange wig and lighting bolt makeup.

  “You don’t remember me at all, do you?” he s
aid. “I should have known, in that get-up. Teach me to try to butch it up in a house full of straight boys. Perhaps next time I’ll go as Cleopatra.”

  “Elizabeth Taylor or Amanda Barrie?” asked Rose, and immediately blushed again - understanding a moment too late that a boy like that, with an accent like that, was a more likely audience for Dryden’s All For Love than for Carry On Cleo.

  The choice of options, though, seemed to delight him.

  “Oh, Amanda, absolutely!” he hooted. “Always Amanda. Liz is so po-faced, isn’t she? So serious. No, I prefer...”

  He stopped, mid-sentence, and seemed to take her in, to catalogue and name her - the bright red hair, stylelessly centre-parted and reaching almost to her hips; the patterned ankle-length skirt; the long-sleeved marinière, the most considered of her wardrobe choices, modelled after Jean Seberg in A bout de souffle.

  “You’re new, aren’t you?” he said.

  “I’ve not been here before, no,” she answered, ignoring the obvious subtext of the question and sounding, to her ears, more conspicuously northern - more clanging and leaden - than she ever had at home.

  “You don’t have to be embarrassed,” the boy said. “We were all new once. Who brought you?”

  Not who are you here with?, she thought - who brought you? As if you couldn’t just be there; couldn’t just turn up unannounced. No, you had to be “brought,” had to be shown around - introduced to the regulars like a debutante at a coming-out ball, a new initiate at a secret society.

  “Nobody,” she said, mustering defiance. “I’m here on my own.”

  He looked her up and down again, reappraising her.

  “Gosh,” he said. “You’re brave. It took my friend Anthony at least three tries to persuade me to walk through the door. And that was after I’d sunk the best part of a bottle of creme de cacao.”